


When All You Are is Dust

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Cliffhangers, Drabble, F/M, Feelings, Mutual Pining, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 13:35:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12632112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: “This is really what my life has come to. A pathetic, depressing episode of Maury.”“That mean no confetti cannons if it’s not mine?” Frank jokes as he sinks down next to her on the bed, cautiously trying to inject a bit of levity into this otherwise dismal clusterfuck of a situation they’ve gotten themselves into.Or, Frank, Laurel, and a paternity test that changes everything and nothing.





	When All You Are is Dust

**Author's Note:**

> A lil drabble originally posted on tumblr. Title from the song Veka by Zola Jesus, which played during the Flaurel scene in Thursday's ep and is <3.

“This is really what my life has come to. A pathetic, depressing episode of Maury.”

“That mean no confetti cannons if it’s not mine?” Frank jokes as he sinks down next to her on the bed, cautiously trying to inject a bit of levity into this otherwise dismal clusterfuck of a situation they’ve gotten themselves into.

Laurel snorts, and turns the envelope over in her hands. “No. But. You’re still free to do a dance or something.” She sighs, still not making a move to open it. “Y’know, there’s… casual slut, office slut – and once you hit paternity test slut… You can’t get any worse than that. I’ve peaked.”

“Aw c’mon,” he chides. “Don’t say those things about yourself.”

“Why? You should wanna say worse,” she tells him, voice low, mournful. “After the way I treated you. I was… horrible.” Laurel pauses, and it’s a heavy, grave pause. “That seems to be a recurring theme with me.”

“You’re not horrible. You were… scared.” He furrows his brow, looking closer at her. She’s shaded gold in the dingy light in Wes’s apartment; it smells like dust and old paper, here, all cramped and cobwebbed, and he can’t help but think this is no place for her to live, let alone for the  _baby_  to live. “So am I.”

She seems to sag under the weight of her exhaustion, hugging her cardigan around herself. “It just – it has to be Wes’s, okay? It cannot be yours. I told… I told myself all these months it’s his, it has to be.”

She’s only half-heartedly trying to convince herself, at this point, staring down the envelope that holds both their futures contained within it, that lets him off the hook or shoves that hook right back into his mouth. Bizarrely, though, it doesn’t feel like a hook, like an obligation he wants to escape; there’s no place he’d rather be but here, and he wants to say that to her but the words feel trite, cliched, unworthy of her.

“Okay,” he says simply, with an accepting nod. “So it’s his.”

Laurel scoffs. “What, you don’t want it to be yours?”

“I’m not sayin’ that, I just-” He exhales, unable to articulate himself properly and increasingly frustrated by the fact. “I want what you want. You want it to be his, so do I.”

“You gonna stick around if it is?” she asks, with a wry grin. “Raise some other guy’s baby?”

“Hey,” he soothes, inching closer to her as if to knock his elbow against hers. “I said no matter what. That means no matter what.”

Silence. The air in here feels heavier. This place feels haunted by ghosts, memories of the past replaying themselves. She’d called him here grudgingly, acknowledging the fact that this affects him too, no matter how much she fears it. It feels like she holds the entire galaxy in her palms, the beginning and ending of the world.

Finally, Laurel gives a watery laugh. “What kind of mother could I be anyway? I don’t even know whose baby this is. He…” Her eyes drop down to her stomach. She gulps. “He deserves better than me.”

_He._  Frank’s heart clenches, something like the very faintest beginnings of hope knotting inside it. The orbit of the earth itself seems to halt, all the distant moons and the stars and suns freezing with it, at that one word. One syllable. Barely anything at all.

It’s everything.  _He._

“He?” Frank echoes, breathless, full of wonder. “It’s a, uh… it’s a boy?”

A smile, of all things, folds out onto her lips; small, unsure. “Yeah.”

She refocuses on the envelope in her hands, still unable to open it, unable to do anything other than stare. That’s when it hits him.

“Why don’t we just toss it?” he suggests, suddenly. “Shred the thing. It don’t matter.”

Laurel blinks. “How can you say it doesn’t matter?”

“We decide it don’t. Because it don’t. It won’t change things, Laurel. No piece of paper’s gonna change the way I feel about you. Who cares what the others think? Screw ‘em. You ‘n me… we’re the only ones that matter.” He licks his lips, his mouth suddenly dry. “We could be a family, you ‘n me ‘n him. Doesn’t matter whose he is; family’s not all about blood. Sometimes… sometimes you make it.”

Frank meets her eyes. She’s listening, spellbound, shaken. He swallows again, steadies his voice long enough to continue.

“You could open your own practice, after graduation. Take me on as a partner. We trade the kid back and forth between hearings at the courthouse. Get our names on a sign, the whole nine yards. Law Office of Castillo and Delfino. Or – hey, we get hitched, I take your name. Castillo and Castillo. The little guy grows up, wants in one day, then we call it Castillo Cubed.”

“You want that?” she murmurs, as if awestruck. “With me?”

“’Course,” is all he says. “I want everything with you.”

It’s a pipe dream. More than likely it’ll only ever be a fantasy. Yet he wants it so badly, right then, that he can’t breathe.

Laurel fixes her eyes straight ahead, raises her chin. She thinks, for a very long moment, before turning the envelope over so it faces up in her palms, shaking her head.

“I just – I need to know. I can’t handle not knowing anymore.”

He isn’t disappointed. He’d expected about as much, because as much as this has been weighing on him, Frank knows it must be weighing on her ten times more, carrying around a child inside her she doesn’t know who fathered, like a lie hidden underneath her sweater.

_He._  He can’t hope. Shouldn’t hope.

_He._  He can’t help but hope, secretly.

“This doesn’t change things, though,” she says, looking to him for reassurance. “Right?”

He nods, gives her a grin. “There’s nothin’ that could ever change the way I feel about you. Not this. Not anything.”  _No matter what._

Laurel hesitates. She takes a breath to steel herself, and he breathes with her.

She tears it open.


End file.
